In the gaming industry, there is a need for automation of tracking of activities happening at table games. Casino chips, playing cards, card hands, wagers, payouts, chip tray float, currency transactions, game outcomes and players are examples of items and activities that are tracked and monitored at casino table games. Amongst other applications, automated tracking would improve player tracking, game security, operational efficiency monitoring, and can enable development of new table games involving concepts such as bonusing, jackpots, progressive jackpots and side betting.
There are several issues and challenges with overhead video camera based game monitoring. One challenge is that performing repetitive optical recognition on consecutive images in a video stream can be processing intensive. Another challenge is that gaming objects might occasionally be partially or entirely occluded from an overhead camera view. A playing card can be occluded because of the dealer's clothing, hands or other gaming objects. Yet another issue is that cards and card hands that are moved on the table can result in blurred images. Sometimes, due to space constraints a dealer may place playing card hands such that two or more playing card hands have some overlap even though ideally there should not be any overlap between distinct playing card hands. There could be other objects on the table, such as patterns on dealer clothing, that may appear somewhat similar to a playing card shape and consequently result in erroneous playing card detection (“false positives”). The disclosed invention seeks to alleviate some of these problems and challenges with respect to overhead video camera based game monitoring.
It is unreasonable to expect any gaming object positioning and identification system to be perfect. There are often scenarios where a game tracking method must analyze ambiguous gaming object data in determining the game state and game progress. For instance, an overhead video camera based recognition system can produce ambiguous or incomplete data caused by playing card occlusion, movement, false positives, dealer mistakes and overlapping of card hands. Other systems involving RFID embedded playing cards could produce similar ambiguity relating to position, movement, distinction of separate card hands, dealer mistakes false positives etc. The disclosed invention seeks to alleviate some of the challenges of ambiguous data by providing methods to improve robustness of game tracking.